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Manufactured in the United States of America

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With its eminent scholars and world-renowned library and archives, the Hoover
Institution seeks to improve the human condition by advancing ideas that
promote economic opportunity and prosperity, while securing and safeguarding
peace for America and all mankind. The views expressed in its publications are
entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff,
officers, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution.

THE HOOVER INSTITUTION’S WORKING GROUP on Foreign Policy and
Grand Strategy began in 2013. Its aim was to convene a small group
of Hoover and Stanford scholars across disciplines, political perspectives, and areas of expertise to examine the most important foreign
policy challenges of our time. We have met quarterly for the past
two years, examining, reading, and writing individual “think pieces”
about six broad issues: whether a grand strategy is possible today;
the domestic foundations of international power; the rise of China;
global governance; weak and failed states; and unconventional or
“black swan” threats, including terrorism and cyber security. The full
set of think pieces can be found on our website at www.hoover.org
/research-teams/working-group-foreign-policy.
We began with three goals. The first was to learn—by gathering on a
regular basis the smartest people we knew to share, analyze, and challenge ideas about US foreign policy. Our second goal was to create a
mechanism whereby each member could inject new ideas and recommendations into the policy process throughout the life of the working
group by publishing individual essays each quarter. Our third goal was
to see whether we could come to any consensus about the most important security challenges and appropriate responses for the next president, whoever that might be. Despite the wide range of perspectives we

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Stephen D. Krasner
Amy B. Zegart
Cochairs of the Hoover Institution’s
Working Group on Foreign
Policy and Grand Strategy
December 9, 2015

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deliberately sought for the group, we wanted to avoid a watered-down,
least-common denominator product.
Most but not all the members of our working group have associated
their names with this product. Most have served in government under
both Democratic and Republican administrations. The true test of any
group like this is whether the individuals in it leave thinking harder and
better than they did before. For us, at least, the answer is a resounding yes.
Our working group would not exist without the generous support
of the Davies family and the Hoover Institution. We would also like to
thank Benjamin Buch for providing essential research assistance and
support while pursuing his PhD in political science at Stanford.
Although presidential elections tend to magnify differences, we
need to remember that Americans are basically united. We all seek a
secure and prosperous nation that can lead the way to a more peaceful and hopeful world. This strategy endeavors to lay out the conceptual
and policy roadmap for success.

THE UNITED STATES IS exceptionally secure. Today, there is no country
that threatens America as Germany, Japan, or the Soviet Union did in
the last century. In the short and medium term, there is no value system that could displace America’s conception of individual liberty and
a market-oriented economy—principles that have been embraced by
all of the world’s rich industrialized countries.
Many Americans, however, do not feel secure. This anxiety stems
from a number of sources. Chief among them is the fact that the United
States confronts three longer-term challenges to national security and
economic prosperity and substantial uncertainty about how these challenges will develop over time. Two emanate from large conventional
countries with substantial resources, Russia and China, one declining and the other rising. The third challenge consists of “black swan”
dangers such as nuclear, biological, or cyber attacks that could kill
thousands or even millions of people or could severely disrupt liberal
society. These black swan dangers arise from state and non-state actors
such as transnational terrorist groups.
The United States must have a national security strategy that can
address these threats, any of which might or might not emerge. Such
a strategy must acknowledge uncertainty, accept that in dealing
with autocratic states there may only be choices among unattractive

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options, hedge as well as engage, and acknowledge that resources are
not limitless.
Three orienting principles should guide the national security strategy
of the next president.
First, we should be unapologetic about the pursuit of American economic and security interests and more tempered in the pursuit of ideals. The most important opportunities for America to shape the future
derive from the success of the American model: democracy, accountability, economic openness, and an assimilationist culture based on
shared liberal values. America’s ability to shape the future trajectory
of world development and security will depend more on how well its
domestic polity and economy function than on its ability to intervene
in other countries.
Second, the United States should focus on nurturing and utilizing
existing strengths. We should take advantage of the large capital investments that we have made in alliances and institutions over the last sixty
years that form the cornerstone of the international order. More specifically, this means protecting and bolstering existing alliances and
regional organizations to share in the responsibility of maintaining
regional stability, particularly in Europe and the Asia Pacific; supporting and adapting international institutions (including the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the United Nations); contemplating the creation of new institutions only as circumstances require;
and employing targeted policy levers against specific foreign actors and
institutions. The United States should use its newfound energy resources
to further strategic objectives, especially in Europe and the Middle East.
Third, the next president must focus on developing national capabilities (diplomatic, economic, political, and military) that can be
deployed against a number of different potential threats rather than
being dedicated to any one possible kind of threat that might never
manifest itself.
Uncertainty in the contemporary environment is pervasive for two
reasons. First, for the first time one of the world’s major powers, China,
is a developing country. Its future capabilities and intentions cannot be

7 Pursue a China policy that offers China a path to integrating
into the existing international order but hedges in the event that
China does not or cannot become a responsible global power.
The United States should offer to include China to an even
greater extent in existing international and regional initiatives.
At the same time, however, the United States must hedge against
a China that could reject the norms and values of the existing
international order by maintaining US regional alliance structures and by developing partnerships with other major Asian
countries, notably India and Indonesia.
7 Recognize that nonconventional threats from weak actors must
be understood as black swans: low likelihood events whose
probability distribution cannot be estimated but that would be
extremely consequential if they occurred. The United States must
focus on strengthening intelligence and security capacities in
other states that are threatened by transnational terrorism and on
employing the targeted use of military power rather than pursuing forcible regime change.
7 Make a sharp distinction between NATO and non-NATO member states, leaving no ambiguity in the minds of Russian leaders that any effort to invade or dismember a NATO member state
would be met by force.

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known. Second, actors with limited capabilities, both state and nonstate, could procure weapons—cyber, biological, nuclear—that could
kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in the most powerful states in the world. In contrast, Russia, a country whose capabilities and intentions are known, presents a more conventional challenge.
The next president of the United States should:

THE UNITED STATES IS exceptionally secure. Unlike during the previous century, there is no country such as Germany, Japan, or the Soviet
Union that today presents a clear, imminent security threat. In the short
and medium term, there is also no alternative value system that could
displace America’s conception of individual liberty and a marketoriented economy—principles that have been embraced by all of the
world’s wealthy industrialized countries in Western Europe, North
America, and East Asia.
Many Americans, however, do not feel secure. This anxiety stems
from a number of sources. Chief among them is the fact that the United
States confronts three longer-term challenges to national security and
economic prosperity and substantial uncertainty about how these challenges will develop over time. Two are large conventional countries
with substantial resources, Russia and China, one declining and the
other rising. The third challenge consists of “black swan” dangers such
as nuclear, biological, or cyber attacks that could kill thousands or even
millions of people or could severely disrupt liberal society. These black
swan dangers arise from states as well as non-state actors such as transnational terrorist groups.
The United States must have a national security strategy that can
address these threats, any of which might or might not emerge. Such
a strategy must acknowledge uncertainty, accept that in dealing with

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autocratic states there may only be choices among unattractive options,
hedge as well as engage, and acknowledge that resources are not
limitless.
Many moments in history appear to be unique for the policymakers
responsible for national security. Few actually are. The present moment,
however, presents American leaders with an unusually wide array of
dynamic challenges. Three are most important. Two of these are historically unprecedented. The first challenge is China’s rise. If China continues along its current economic trajectory, it will displace the United
States as the country with the most material resources in the world,
a position the United States has enjoyed for more than one hundred
years. If China does not continue along its current trajectory, it could
also become a destabilizing force in the world. China’s future path is
highly uncertain. While China’s economic development benefits markets and peoples worldwide, its policy choices could pose a threat to
the preservation of existing international regimes, US economic interests, and American values. America still has many strengths in East
Asia, including its own military resources, soft power, and a “hub-andspokes” alliance system that has helped maintain peace and prosperity
in the region for many decades. The United States has the opportunity
to influence the options confronting China’s leaders even if it cannot
influence directly that country’s domestic trajectory.
The second historically unprecedented challenge stems from the fact
that the ability to do harm on a large scale no longer depends entirely
on the underlying material resources of states. Today, states, non-state
actors, and even individuals with very limited resources might be able
to direct cyber, biological, or nuclear attacks against the United States.
Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Iran, even if the new agreement is fully
honored, has the capacity to make nuclear weapons quickly. In both of
these countries, and in other Middle Eastern countries, there are groups
or individuals that adhere to a millenarian jihadist ideology that is antithetical to Western liberal values. A single individual could initiate a
global pandemic that could kill millions of people. An attack against
the United States with weapons of mass destruction could kill large

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numbers of Americans or create a domestic environment that would
fundamentally alter American liberal society.
The uncertainty of these dangerous threats and their diversity make
it impossible to identify a single deployment of resources that would be
optimal against every possible or likely future scenario. Threat uncertainty and diversity also make it more difficult to engage potential
allies. In the past, foreign policy uncertainty was generated primarily
by doubt about the intention of actors (other major powers), not by a
lack of information about their capacities; in the present environment
there is doubt about both capacities and intentions. The United States
does have some opportunities for improving governance in areas of
limited statehood that could harbor transnational terrorists, but these
are restricted to enhancing security, improving the delivery of some
services, and encouraging economic growth. Putting countries confidently on the road to fully consolidated democracy is beyond the
capacity of the United States, or any other advanced nation.
The third major challenge for American foreign policy, Russia, presents a more traditional set of problems. Russia is a declining power, but
it still has formidable resources. Its nuclear arsenal could destroy the
United States and much of the rest of the world. It is mostly surrounded
by poorly governed states, most of which used to be part of the Soviet
Union, including some with substantial energy resources. Its military
capacity is much greater than that of any of its neighbors except China.
Its current leadership is deeply suspicious of the West in general and
the United States in particular.
With regard to Russia, existing capabilities and institutions, especially NATO, provide the United States with important advantages.
Frustrating Russian ambitions is, however, not enough. The United
States has some shared interests with Russia in the Middle East and
with regard to transnational terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

Of all great powers in history, the United States stands alone in three
key respects. First, with regard to war, conflict, and foreign affairs,

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the experience of the United States has been more benign than that
of any other major power. China was devastated by foreign conquest,
civil war, and malign leaders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Japan’s major cities and millions of its citizens were annihilated during the Second World War. Europe’s position as the beacon
of human development was demolished by the first and second World
Wars. In contrast, the United States, since its independence, has only
been invaded once, by Britain in the War of 1812. The worst martial
calamity for the United States was the Civil War, which killed more
Americans than any of its foreign wars.
Second, the United States has had an exceptionally long and successful run as the world’s dominant power, rivaled in modern times perhaps only by Great Britain in the nineteenth century. America’s leading
global position has only begun to erode over the past two decades.
Third, the United States has always been concerned with values
as well as material interests. For most of its history, the United States
adopted a Jeffersonian stance: America as the city on a hill, the shining example to the rest of the world. At other moments, however, the
United States has actively promoted democracy. There has, however,
always been debate about the level of resources and strategies that the
United States should use to promote its ideals.
In the United States, material assets were linked from the Republic’s
founding with two very effective national security strategies: first “isolationism” and then containment. “Isolationism” has been misconstrued. This grand strategy, which was framed by the Founding Fathers
and guided foreign affairs until the First World War, was immensely
successful and deserves to be recognized as something much more
consequential and nuanced than the kind of irresponsible, parochial,
xenophobic, and ignorant dogma that it is frequently characterized
as being. More aptly called “pragmatic engagement,” this early grand
strategy enabled the United States to effectively safeguard its national
sovereignty (the first and essential requirement of any nation’s foreign policy), with minimum human and fiscal expense, and thereby

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position itself to become the dominant international actor of the
modern era.
From George Washington’s Farewell Address to Thomas Jefferson’s
declaration in his first inaugural that he sought “peace, commerce, and
friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none,” to John
Quincy Adams’s proclamation in 1821 that America “goes not abroad
in search of monsters to destroy,” through the Monroe Doctrine in
1823—American foreign policy focused first and foremost on a set of
orienting principles. These were: building and protecting democracy at
home; safeguarding its sovereignty from European invasion or intervention; dominating the Western hemisphere; extending its influence into
the Pacific region; staying out of Europe; and maintaining global freedom of navigation and commerce. All of the major foreign policy decisions of the nineteenth century were consistent with these principles
and collectively composed a strategy of pragmatic engagement highlighted by the Louisiana Purchase, the Monroe Doctrine, the war with
Mexico, statehood for Texas, the opening of Japan, the Civil War (which
was fought in part to prevent a second large and independent state from
emerging in North America), the purchase of Alaska, and the SpanishAmerican War (resulting in significant territorial acquisitions, including
in the Western Pacific).
The first major departure from the policies associated with pragmatic engagement was America’s entry into the First World War and
Woodrow Wilson’s decision to frame American military engagement
as an effort not simply to defend American material security or to further American interests but rather to transform the nature of the international system. Wilson believed that only a democratic Europe could
protect America from European conflicts.
Wilson’s attempt to redesign America’s grand strategy failed. The Senate rejected American participation in the League of Nations. The minority rights provisions negotiated for some thirty states at the end of the
war were mostly ignored by the 1930s. The democratic experiment
in Germany, the Weimar Republic, collapsed into Hitler’s Third Reich.

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America’s first foray into a grand strategy that was more ambitious than
the prescriptions of pragmatic engagement was a fiasco.
After the First World War, however, pragmatic engagement was no
longer an effective guide for American foreign policy. The United States
could not stand aside from European conflicts without endangering
its own security. Yet, the First World War and its aftermath blinded the
American public to the threat presented by Germany and Japan until
the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The successor to pragmatic engagement, containment, was a logically integrated and coherent grand strategy. Its core principle was to
contain the spread of communism anyplace in the world. Because the
enemy of the United States was the Soviet Union, containment combined both interests and ideals. American leaders countered the political and ideological ambitions of the Soviet Union. The United States
opposed communism around the world in many different ways. It supported non-communist political parties in Italy and France in the late
1940s, supported third world dictators who at least verbally pledged
opposition to the Soviet Union, undertook controversial covert interventions in many countries (including Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, the
Dominican Republic, and Chile), and fought hot wars in Korea and
Vietnam.
Not all the policies associated with containment were successful. The United States was forced to an armistice, which essentially
restored the status quo ante, in Korea in 1953, though the Republic
of Korea eventually dwarfed its northern adversary with its impressive political-economic evolution. A communist regime took control
in Cuba. America’s South Vietnamese ally was defeated by its northern adversary in 1975, and the two states were unified as the Socialist
Republic of Vietnam. The proxy forces that had helped to drive the
Soviet Union out of Afghanistan misgoverned their country, leading
to the rise of the Taliban, which in turn harbored al-Qaeda and enabled
the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Despite setbacks, many of which were substantial, American foreign policy in the age of containment was on balance a spectacular

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success. Stanford scholar Francis Fukuyama was not wrong in pointing in 1989 to the end of history. After the defeat of fascism and
communism, no globally legitimated set of norms has emerged to challenge the principles associated with a market economy (limited state
power, protection of property rights, sanctity of contract, rule of law)
and consolidated democracy (free and fair elections, freedom of religion, human rights, an independent civil society, a critical and autonomous media). Third world proposals for a new international economic
order crumbled by the late 1980s and virtually all major countries
joined the World Trade Organization. Most of the Eastern and Central
European states, which had been part of the Soviet sphere of influence
or the Soviet Union itself, became members of the European Union
and NATO.
Moreover, many of the institutional arrangements that were first
established during the Cold War persisted beyond the collapse of communism. The United States made a clear military commitment to the
protection of Europe through NATO. The U.S. guaranteed the independence of Japan and Korea through bilateral treaties, although it
has never succeeded in constructing an integrated alliance system in
Asia. The open international economic order supported by the World
Bank, the IMF, and the WTO has continued even as the United States
has become more focused on regional trading orders.
The 1990s were a honeymoon period. The United States seemed to
have more than enough resources to deal with the international challenges that it confronted, none of which was regarded as being all that
serious. In his presidential election campaign, George W. Bush focused
on domestic policy and organized his positions around compassionate
conservatism at home and a humble foreign policy abroad. His future
national security advisor and secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, in
a 2000 Foreign Affairs article, focused on the international balance of
power and rejected state-building.
This honeymoon period ended with 9/11. Over the next fifteen years,
challenges to American national interests have become both less clear
and more diverse.

The national security landscape for the foreseeable future will be
marked by unprecedented uncertainty. New threats are emerging and
old threats are evolving at speeds unknown in earlier eras. Throughout
the Cold War, the United States faced the grave prospect of nuclear
war, but foreign policy leaders operated in a more straightforward
strategic landscape that made formulating the grand strategy of containment possible. They knew the United States confronted a single
principal adversary. A well-resourced intelligence community provided good estimates of Soviet capabilities and intentions. Today, by
contrast, the number, identity, and magnitude of many of the dangers threatening American security and interests are unclear and fluid.
Is China a rising power or a fragile one, a disruptive challenger or a
responsible stakeholder? How serious is the transnational Islamist terrorist threat? Is it increasing, decreasing, or plateauing? How likely is
a “digital Pearl Harbor” that disables US strategic nuclear forces or
brings down critical infrastructures? What are the prospects for nuclear
proliferation and the use (accidental or deliberate) of nuclear weapons? Does the increasing availability of lethal pathogens substantially
increase the likelihood of their use or is the impossibility of controlling such an attack, or revulsion against it, enough to make them so
unattractive that they will not be used? Despite very large increases in
US intelligence budgets since 9/11, the answers to these questions are
still debated inside and outside of government precisely because they
are largely unknowable. The core foreign policy debates of yesteryear
focused on “how” questions—how to pursue the strategy of containment, how to accelerate the rollback of communism. Soviet intentions
and capabilities were more or less clear after 1947. At least American
decision-makers could confidently identify what they believed to be
the greatest threat to American national security, even if they were
not always certain about Soviet intentions or capabilities. The core
foreign policy debates today focus on “what” questions—what is the
nature, scale, scope, and imminence of various dangers. These are very

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7 an accurate understanding of the international environment
7 a vision of what that environment might become by shaping
international
7 regimes, altering the external opportunity sets facing leaders in
other states, and influencing domestic authority structures in
other states
7 a set of specific policies that can realize that vision
7 heuristic power to define policies for unforeseen challenges
7 organizational and administrative structures within the state that
can implement these policies
7 resources and domestic political support to pay for these policies
7 support from other actors in the international system who share
the same vision and endorse the associated policies, even if their
material contributions are modest
In the current environment, the rise of China—or, more precisely,
uncertainty about the trajectory of China’s rise—and uncertainty about
the lethality of unconventional threats and related developments in the
Middle East preclude the development of an integrated grand strategy like containment. The United States must deploy its resources, formidable but limited, in a way that recognizes that the most serious
challenges to American national security might or might not manifest
themselves. Given the uncertainty endemic to almost all of America’s
foreign policy challenges, pragmatic engagement offers a more useful strategic model. In the nineteenth century, pragmatic engagement

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different worlds. The inescapable fact of life that must guide America’s
national security strategy today is threat uncertainty in many arenas.
In particular, we cannot be sure about the capabilities and intentions
of weak actors with potential access to weapons of mass destruction
or of a future China.
Uncertainty precludes the development of an integrated grand strategy, a strategy in which a single overarching principle like containment
informs a wide range of policies in specific issue areas that are logically
related to each other. An integrated grand strategy requires:

General Orienting Principles
for a New National Security Strategy
Threat uncertainty gives rise to the following three principles to orient
America’s national security strategy: focus on protecting the material
well-being of the United States, both security and economic; invest in
existing institutional structures; and develop flexible rather than dedicated capabilities.
First, uncertainty requires that we must be unapologetic about pursuit of American national economic and security interests, and more
tempered in our pursuit of ideals that might undermine what little authority already exists in weakly governed polities and threaten
American security. The primary goals of American foreign policy are
not in dispute. There is no disagreement about the first priority of any
American strategy, grand or not: the protection of the physical security of the United States and its citizens. The second objective, also not
contested, is a strong and innovative economy in the United States that
can provide the resources for not only the well-being of Americans,
but also for foreign policy initiatives that are needed to achieve other
objectives.
What is contested is the relative importance and especially the
most effective way to promote the values that inform the American
polity: democracy and human rights. America has always stood for
universal freedoms, but we have pursued those freedoms abroad in
different ways, to different degrees, in different times as the external

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meant: no major European powers in the Western Hemisphere; no
involvement in Europe’s wars; freedom of navigation and open commerce; and expanding influence in the Pacific region. In the twenty-first
century, pragmatic engagement means hedging against a continued
increase in Chinese power while continuing to offer China a path to
integrate into the current global order; being able to identify and counter unconventional threats without attempting to transform regimes in
badly governed states; and drawing red lines for Russia that make a
clear distinction between NATO and non-NATO states.

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environment demanded and internal capabilities allowed. Sometimes
the United States has declared the importance of these values without
assertively encouraging their adoption or imposing them elsewhere.
Sometimes the U.S. has pursued an active Wilsonian policy designed to
install, instill, and promote democracy and human rights in other countries. Wilsonianism worked in Germany and Japan after the Second
World War. During the Cold War, however, democracy generally faltered, although there were notable successes, such as in the Republic
of Korea and Taiwan. In the era of containment, the United States was
more interested in supporting regimes, including autocratic regimes,
which opposed communism and the Soviet Union. The collapse of
the Soviet Union and the transformation of the former Soviet satellites
in Eastern and Central Europe into members of the European Union
and NATO seemed to vindicate Wilsonianism. President Bush’s 2002
National Security Strategy reflected an even more ambitious Wilsonian
aspiration to transform Afghanistan and the Middle East into democratic states that would resist transnational terrorism. However, the outcomes of American interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya during
the last fifteen years suggest that in many countries the active promotion of American values, democracy, and human rights are unlikely to
succeed. Instead, the most fruitful path toward spreading democratization comes not from toppling dictators when there is no clear path to
a successor regime, but from bolstering civil society to lay the foundations for internal democratic evolution and demonstrating the benefits
of democracy by example. Quasi-governmental and non-governmental
agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the German party foundations are ideal instruments for supporting civil society
organizations that may prove critical for democratic transitions at some
future historical juncture. The world is not inexorably moving toward
consolidated democracy, but American policy can help to put in place
the pieces that make such transitions more likely and more successful
when they occur.
Second, the United States should focus on nurturing and utilizing existing institutions. This means supporting alliances, regional

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organizations, and international institutions that have formed the cornerstone of the international order since the end of World War II. More
specifically, the next president should take two actions which are
described in detail below. They are: protect and bolster existing alliances and regional organizations to share in the responsibility of maintaining regional stability, particularly in Europe and the Asia Pacific
region; and, where possible, maintain and adapt existing international
institutions (including the IMF, World Bank, and UN).
Protect and bolster existing alliances and regional organizations
to share in the responsibility of maintaining regional stability, particularly in Europe and the Asia Pacific region: Many observers thought
that NATO would disappear after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It has not. NATO has been invoked, for better or worse, to support
activities in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere. One major
strength of NATO lies in Article 5 of its charter. Article 5 provides a
bright line between NATO members and non-NATO states. It reduces
ambiguity in Europe about which kinds of Russian expansionist activities could be tolerated and which could not. The United States should
continue to strongly encourage NATO members to meet their commitment to increase defense spending to 2 percent of GDP; but even if
this effort fails, NATO is extremely valuable as a mechanism to reduce
uncertainty about American commitments in Europe.
The hub-and-spokes American alliance structure in Asia, centered on
mutual defense treaties with Japan, South Korea, and Australia, is not
ideal. But it serves to underline American commitments in the Western
Pacific. The United States should explore opportunities for partnerships with other countries in East and South Asia, including India and
Indonesia. All will be leery of being tied too closely to the United States
but they all will find America as a distant partner more attractive than
an ambitious and closer China.
Beyond these bilateral relationships, the United States should vigorously promote settlement of territorial disputes in multilateral fora like
ASEAN, the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), and the East Asian Summit.
The smaller countries in the region in particular should not have to

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face China on a bilateral basis. The United States should take a principled position that territorial disputes should be settled multilaterally
under commonly accepted international principles and should help the
smaller states organize collectively to this end.
In the Middle East there is no present or possible alliance structure
comparable to NATO or even those in East Asia. At the moment, one
major challenge to American interests is Iran, a state with limited capabilities but advanced nuclear technology. Iran can threaten regional
actors and further destabilize the Middle East, but its geographic reach
is limited. The nuclear agreement can only be one piece of a more
general strategy that is aimed at preventing Iranian dominance in the
region. Iran is the most important external player in Syria and Lebanon
and has substantial influence in Yemen and Iraq. Iran is not, however,
the only challenge in the region. As a result of poor governance, sectarian rivalries, and ISIS, the sovereign state system is unraveling. Militant
jihadism offers an ideology that is attractive to some individuals in the
West as well as the Middle East. The disintegration of state authority is
already generating a major refugee crisis for Europe.
The best hope for some degree of stability would be to strengthen
the authority of those states in the region with which the United States
shares at a minimum a common interest in preserving order and security. The next president should work to strengthen bilateral arrangements with countries whose interests are most threatened by Iran and
which could pose a regional counterweight to Iranian power while also
buttressing sovereign state authority to stabilize the region. These efforts
should focus principally on Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and the
Gulf States. Some of these countries, however, especially Saudi Arabia,
do not share American values. The dangerous mix of militant jihadism,
regional rivalries, and sectarian warfare caution against commitments
that would make the United States hostage to the national policies of
any state in the Middle East. We must strengthen the regimes of our
very diverse Middle East allies but also make it clear that we will not
necessarily back their foreign policy initiatives and that political reform
is in the long-term interests of both their regimes and regional security.

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Where possible maintain and adapt existing international institutions (including the IMF, World Bank, and UN): Where new organizations are needed to address new challenges, the United States may
have to rely on coalitions of the willing but should also remain open
to the use, adaptation, or creation of specialized agencies to deal with
major transnational problems so long as US interests are protected
through appropriate processes and voting arrangements.
The third general orienting principle that follows from threat uncertainty is that we must focus on the development of capabilities that
can be deployed against multiple threats—sequentially and simultaneously. Reinvigorating the international order is not enough. The United
States must also invest in developing creative, targeted, unilateral policy levers to advance American interests when necessary. Today we
face a growing array of asymmetrical threats, from China’s high-tech
hacking and threats to US space-based commercial, military, and intelligence satellites, to low-tech IED attacks on US forces in Afghanistan.
This landscape demands that the United States develop more agile military capabilities and more robust non-military levers to advance our
vital interests since the United States, no matter how powerful, cannot
protect itself against every hazard, everywhere, under every contingency, in a world where large destructive capabilities rest in the hands
of small, otherwise weak actors. Smarter spending measures imply
realigning US intelligence and defense expenditures, investing much
more heavily in developing large quantities of sophisticated, lower-cost
unmanned systems (surveillance and strike), as well as cyber capabilities, and moving away from a dependence on large, limited-­capability,
expensive weapons platforms such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
Despite widespread bipartisan calls for greater innovation and acquisition reform, resistance remains strong. Without a major commitment
to reform, the United States will continue to fund expensive, inflexible, large platform systems that are ill-suited for tomorrow’s threat
environment.
The United States has developed over the last several decades a
number of new and imaginative targeted policy levers such as financial

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sanctions. These new policy levers need to be refined and expanded,
and should include the development of a strategic energy policy to
spur growth, reduce carbon emissions, and improve the energy security of our allies. US dependence on foreign oil is now at a forty-year
low. The United States has become the world’s largest oil and natural
gas producer. The next president must leverage our newfound energy
resources to enhance our global leadership, reduce the impact of
Middle Eastern conflict on global energy markets, and help allies, particularly in Europe, gain energy security while reducing global carbon
pollution. The first step forward is removing restrictions on the export
of American natural gas and oil.

WHILE THE UNITED STATES confronts a wide array of foreign policy challenges, three stand apart: China, unconventional threats, and Russia.

China
Alternative Futures
China is a rising power, but it is not clear how far it will rise. Chinese
development could proceed along four paths.
1. Soft rise: China might continue to grow at a rapid pace, at least
considerably more rapidly than the United States and other
industrialized countries, create a large middle class, and transition into a democratic country.
2. Economic growth and political autocracy: China might continue to grow and remain an autocracy with state-led capitalism. This would be a historically unprecedented development;
there are no large countries and only a very few small countries, like Singapore, that have grown rich and not become
full democracies. However, many other elements of China’s

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3. Economic faltering but political resilience: Chinese economic
growth might stall out, while its autocratic political system
persists.
4. Hard landing: China’s internal tensions could lead to a dramatic
fall from its current path, one that would be characterized by
declining or even negative growth rates and internal disorder.
There is no way to predict with any confidence which of these paths
China will follow and the United States has limited ability to influence outcomes. The path that would be most consistent with American
interests and values would be a rising China that transitions to democracy. This would not bring harmony to Chinese-American relations.
China and the United States would still have some major differences
with respect to values and interests. A democratic China could be
more responsive to nationalist pressures. Some incompatibilities, such
as the relative importance of the state in the economy, would, however, be mitigated in a democratic China. This evolution is precisely
what the Chinese regime fears most and accuses the United States of
secretly promoting. All of the other paths pose greater risks for the
United States.
A rich, successful, and autocratic China would challenge American
interests and values; it would signal the end of the end of history. The
third and fourth alternatives—a faltering China or a China suffering
from internal disorder and divisions—would present the greatest dangers for the United States. Such a China might rely increasingly on
nationalist appeals to legitimate the regime. The Chinese leadership
would be more risk-acceptant. The possibilities for heightened political and military conflict with American allies in the Asia-Pacific region,
miscalculation, and a direct military clash with the United States would
be greater.

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growth (including its scale and speed) are also unprecedented.
As Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling once warned, policymakers should be wary of confusing the unfamiliar with the
improbable.

Policy Implications: Integrate but Hedge
Since the Reagan administration, the United States has followed a
two-pronged strategy with regard to China: integrate but hedge. The
commitment to integrate China into the global order was most clearly
manifest in American support for Chinese membership in the World
Trade Organization in the 1990s. The clearest example of hedging
is the continuation of the American alliances with South Korea and

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There is, however, one aspect of the contemporary international system that tempers the direct security threat that China, regardless of
its future trajectory, could pose to the United States: nuclear weapons, including second strike capability. There has been no war among
great powers since 1945, the longest period in the history of the modern state system. The most compelling explanation for this development is the presence of nuclear weapons or, more specifically, second
strike capability. In the past, war could mean physical conquest and the
death or occupation of the state and the domination or even annihilation of its people. Nuclear weapons and second strike capability have
eliminated ambiguity about the outcome of, and value of, a war among
nuclear armed states. There will be no replay of the Second World War.
The most likely result of a full-scale nuclear war is mutual devastation; this is the most important factor in deterring great power conflict.
Regardless of its future growth trajectory, China will not conquer, or
attempt to conquer, the United States, Japan, or Russia.
This does not mean that the rise of China is without serious consequences for the United States, but it does mean that the consequence
that has most alarmed rulers in the past, the fear of conquest and death,
is much less likely. The most dangerous consequence of power transitions in the past—conquest or major boundary changes—are no longer relevant for the great powers. Power transitions may still lead to
tensions and even military confrontation over the sovereignty and interests of allies, spheres of influence, violations of international laws and
norms, and the nature of international regimes, but these are not issues
involving existential threats to America’s national security.

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especially Japan. In recent years there have been more misgivings
about this dual-track policy, misgivings that reflect uncertainty about
Chinese power, especially how far China will rise, and uncertainties
about Chinese intentions: Will China really in the end buy into the
principles and norms that are embedded in the current global order
and play the role of a “responsible stakeholder”? At least one reason
for American resistance to giving China a greater role in existing organizations, such as more votes in the World Bank and the IMF, is this
uncertainty about China’s future power and ambitions.
The United States should end this resistance to integration. China’s
economic rise is not in itself a major threat to US national security
or economic prosperity, any more than the rise of German economic
power and the recovery of Europe after World War II. On the contrary:
the recovery and economic development of Western Europe was an
enormous positive for US growth. Chinese mass production at low cost
has helped keep prices low for ever more sophisticated goods, while
allowing and encouraging US companies to specialize at higher ends
of the value chain. Intermediate skilled workers in the United States
will gradually do better as labor costs in China rise, and as purchasing power grows in China its workers will, in the long run, buy more
US products.
Recent experience, moreover, suggests that policies designed to isolate rather than integrate China into international regimes have backfired. It is time for a new direction. The United States should fully
embrace a policy of giving China the role that its size and contributions warrant in existing international organizations provided that
China agrees to play by the recognized and accepted rules of international behavior. Also, the United States should not resist Chinese
efforts to initiate new organizations such as the Asian Infrastructure
Investment Bank (AIIB) if the principles informing these organizations
are not inconsistent with the basic norms of inclusiveness, transparency,
and rules-based commerce that have informed existing international
regimes. The United States cannot defeat Chinese initiatives by trying to
shut them down. The fifty-seven founding members of the AIIB include

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the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Israel, Brazil, and India. The
United States should also offer China membership in the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP) earlier rather than later, even if we know that China is
unlikely to pursue this offer. The United States can maintain its preeminence only by demonstrating the superiority of its own vision of how
the international system should function, by rallying other countries to
that vision, by offering incentives for China to join rather than reject
it, and by maintaining strong unilateral capabilities (economic, diplomatic, military) and relationships with other states in the event that this
path does not succeed
The United States has also undermined its ability to deal with China’s
rise by failing to ratify the Law of the Sea Convention. This agreement
provides the strongest basis for the norms that the United States has
stood for in the Western Pacific and globally, including freedom of navigation in the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and limited EEZ claims
that can be made for uninhabited or artificially enhanced rocks that are
currently located in the open ocean. These are norms that other countries in the Western Pacific, which have contested China’s expansive
maritime territorial claims, already support. It has been more than thirty
years since the Reagan administration negotiated this treaty, which has
received widespread bipartisan support from the Bush administration, the Obama administration, and the Pentagon. The next president
should work to gain Senate ratification.
At the same time, the United States must continue to hedge. China’s
future capacities and intentions are uncertain and much of its current
behavior is disquieting. It is unclear how long China will remain a relatively compliant player in America’s rules-based world economic system or continue to accept US military activities in the Western Pacific
aimed at ensuring freedom of navigation and the safety of its allies.
China’s leaders seem increasingly discontented with both. Evidence
includes Beijing’s accelerated construction of artificial islands and its
assertiveness when dealing with maritime and territorial disputes with
US allies in the East and South China Seas; and Chinese naval and air
forces aggressively challenging US maritime and air reconnaissance

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activities within its declared EEZs. President Xi has sharply criticized
US security policies in the Asia-Pacific region, pointedly stating: “To
beef up an entrenched or military alliance targeted at a third party is
not conducive to maintaining common security.” China has also consistently opposed the US-backed “global commons” model of Internet
governance, instead advocating state sovereignty over what flows
through the Internet to its citizens, and has engaged in widespread
cyber theft of intellectual property from American companies.
Given the uncertainties of China’s behavior, objectives, and capacity, the United States must continue to support China’s integration while
hedging at the same time. The United States needs to present China
with a set of incentives that encourage its leaders to integrate with and
accept an international order that accommodates China’s interests but
still reaffirms American values and structures that are embodied in existing international regimes. The United States should give China a larger
role in existing international organizations, while reinforcing its existing alliance commitments and partnership relationships in the region.
In addition, a China hedging strategy for the next president should
widen the aperture to develop closer strategic relationships with India
and Indonesia. India and Indonesia are unlikely to enter into anything
like a conventional security alliance with the United States, but they
are much more threatened by rising Chinese power than by continued
American presence in the Western Pacific. The United States should
also encourage more robust relationships between our regional allies
and partners, aiming to form a denser network of states less costly to
the U.S. than the hub-and-spoke system. In reconfiguring our relationships in Asia, a prime objective for the United States must be to secure
greater commitments from allies while at the same time discouraging our key allies, Japan and South Korea, from developing nuclear
weapons programs of their own. A nuclear arms race in Asia would
introduce a new element of uncertainty in the Asia Pacific region and
possibly embolden allies in a way that could be counter to US interests.
The United States is the ideal distant balancer. China’s neighbors will
prefer a world in which the United States is actively involved in Asia

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rather than an Asia that might be dominated by China alone. The United
States should make it clear that the costs to China of trying to establish regional hegemony would be high, by leaving no ambiguity about
our commitment to the security of Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan and
by pursuing closer relations with other countries in the Asian region
that would prefer a world in which both China and the United States
are engaged rather than one dominated by China. Reinforced alliances
and deeper relationships will continue to balance, stabilize, and provide an environment for continued economic growth, enhanced security, and reduced likelihood of nuclear proliferation. Such an approach
demands an unequivocal US commitment to predictable, credible, and
cooperative presence. Sensitivities regarding sovereignty will continue
to increase globally and the Asia-Pacific region will be served best by
a presence that is offshore. This argues for naval and air forces, agile,
small-unit ground forces with a light footprint, and logistic support characterized by minimal infrastructure and rapid response.
Despite China’s spectacular rise over the last two decades, there is
no guarantee that this trajectory will continue. Internally, Beijing’s leaders face an interwoven array of daunting social, environmental, economic, and political problems that, left unresolved, will limit the state’s
ability to generate national power and could even threaten the Communist Party’s monopolistic grip on political and societal control.
A policy that focuses more on engaging China in the existing international order and that hedges by reinforcing existing alliances and
developing new ones would not impede China’s ability to deal with
these challenges. This approach would maximize the likelihood that
China would accept, or at least not actively challenge, key elements
of existing international regimes, which have been consistent with its
economic rise and which reflect American values and institutional
structures.
By maintaining its current key alliances in Asia, by expanding its
engagement with other Asian states that will be concerned with China’s
rise, and by creating new opportunities through such initiatives as the
Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), the United States can make

Unconventional Threats
The defining characteristic of unconventional threats is that actors with
relatively limited material resources can now deploy weapons that
could kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of people or permanently disrupt societies even in the most powerful countries in the

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clear to China’s leaders that fundamental challenges to America’s role
in Asia and the world would be unnecessary and costly. The United
States does not have a strong stake in any particular substantive outcome to any of the existing territorial disputes in the South or East China
seas. America does, however, have an interest in seeing that any such
disputes be settled peacefully in a multilateral setting, and not through
unilateral changes on the part of any one party to the status quo.
Engagement with hedging is also consistent with the most worrisome trajectory for China’s future. China might pose the greatest threat
to American interests if it begins to decline rather than if it continues to
grow. The Communist Party has based its legitimacy on the claim that
it can provide material prosperity and defend China’s national pride.
If economic growth falters, nationalism will become more important
for the Party’s survival. A weakening China might be more aggressive
rather than less aggressive. This aggression would be manifest in rising
Chinese belligerence in its own region rather than contesting ­existing
international regimes. Regional bellicosity—island claims, pressure
against Taiwan, Air Defense Identification Zones, protection of Han
Chinese in neighboring countries, challenging American naval presence in the Western Pacific—offers the biggest payoff in terms of generating nationalist support for the regime.
Countering such pressures, if they do manifest themselves, can be
most effectively done if America’s existing alliance system or, ideally,
an expanded system of partnerships, could be mobilized. If the United
States has maintained or even expanded its present relations, a declining China is less likely to engage in risky nationalist initiatives designed
to strengthen the position of the Party.

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world. Unconventional threats are more challenging than the rise of
China: there is little consensus on the risks that they pose and the way
in which these risks should be addressed. Some of the risks are associated with sovereign states such as Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan,
but others come from non-state actors including covert organizations within the liberal industrialized West, extremist Islamic groups,
other transnational actors, and even disgruntled individuals. Because
of weapons of mass destruction, notably nuclear and biological, the
absence of authority structures within some states, which precludes
deterrence, and the global linkages provided by the worldwide web,
the connection between underlying material resources and the ability
to do harm has been ruptured.
Unconventional threats have created the possibility of “black swans,”
low probability events arising from an unknowable underlying probability distribution, which would be extremely costly if they occurred.
Black swan events are by definition rare and treacherously difficult to
address. They complicate any efforts to formulate a new grand strategy
for the United States. A major security incident that killed thousands
or tens of thousands of citizens (with nuclear weapons or biological
pathogens being the most likely source), or a cyber attack that disabled
the power grid for long periods of time or that scrambled or blocked
access to bank accounts or other financial assets in an advanced industrialized democracy, could change the boundary between individual
freedom and public authority within liberal states and weaken presumptions of sovereign autonomy internationally. Unlike conventional
insurance, there is no way to identify the risk premium that a state
might pay to avoid a low-probability bad outcome because we cannot
determine the probability of such an event with any confidence. All we
can possibly know is that such attacks are possible.
Black swans must be distinguished from other kinds of events that
are hard to anticipate but do not constitute existential security threats.
For example, terrorist attacks that kill small numbers of people—such
as the Boston Marathon bombing, the murders in Charleston, South
Carolina, by a white supremacist, and the attack on American military

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personnel in Chattanooga, Tennessee—are tragic but not existential.
These attacks are best dealt with through domestic intelligence and law
enforcement.
The attacks in Paris, first on the Charlie Hebdo staff and then in
November 2015 on the Bataclan theater and elsewhere, are more on
the cusp between ideologically motivated criminal attacks that kill
small numbers of people randomly and the large-scale deaths that
might be caused by a nuclear or biological attack or the disruption
that could result from cyber attacks on the financial sector or the power
grid. Although the Charlie Hebdo attack killed just eleven people, it
had a chilling effect on public discourse, and the carnage in Paris in
November 2015 has affected people’s behavior and sense of safety.
The terror attack in San Bernardino, California, if repeated, would have
a chilling impact on the United States. More broadly, the willingness
of Islamic terrorists to kill individuals in the West has dampened free
speech and increased anti-Semitism, especially in Europe. Random violence has changed the sense of security experienced by individuals in
Western liberal societies. Freedom of speech and expression is a hardwon privilege that has become widespread in the world only since the
end of the Second World War. It is a fundamental value of modern liberal democracies that can be threatened by terrorism.
Clear existential security threats, by contrast, involve attacks that
could kill thousands of people or lead to fundamental changes in the
principles and laws that govern liberal democratic states and the international sovereign state system. Such attacks could originate with individuals or groups domiciled in an advanced industrialized democratic
state, from an autocratic regime, or from weakly governed or failed
states.
The only sustainable approach for addressing black swans is to
embrace policies that we are confident can reduce their probability
even if we do not know what that probability is. The policies in which
we can have the greatest confidence are those that can be implemented
within the United States itself. These include continued investment in
our own intelligence and policing capacity. The policies in which we

Three black swans: global pandemics,
nuclear terrorism, cyber acts of mass disruption
Global pandemics: The technological skill and resources needed
to produce a pathogen that could have devastating global consequences are becoming more readily available. Modern biotechnology
could produce a pathogen that could kill so many people that modern industrialized polities could not function. One hundred kilograms
of anthrax, for example, distributed over a populated area, could kill
three million people. Such a pathogen could be developed anyplace in
the world, could be delivered remotely by a robotic device that could
be purchased today, and would be extremely difficult to attribute.
The most effective policies for addressing biological threats strengthen
public health systems. This is most easily done in advanced industrialized democracies, but it has also been done in countries with much
more limited resources. Failures at the World Health Organization contributed to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. The epidemic, however,
was avoided in Nigeria because of a patient monitoring system that had
been put in place to address the spread of polio, even though a Liberian
national infected with Ebola landed at Lagos airport. Strengthening the
monitoring and delivery capacity of health systems in weakly governed
states would lessen the probability of a black swan event precipitated
by the introduction of a new or regenerated disease pathogen. It is also

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ought to have the least confidence are those designed to alter the basic
nature of regime structures in other states. There is much the next president can do to reduce unconventional threats without taking on regime
transformation abroad. Specifically, the United States should strengthen
the security capacity of some weakly governed or even failing states
to combat biological and nuclear threats. Although stronger security
institutions in weakly governed states will not necessarily improve
the prospects for representative government, or the better provision of
most services, or human rights, they could reduce the prospect that
poorly governed spaces will provide safe harbor to groups or individuals threatening American security.

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a policy that is likely to be embraced rather than rejected by national
elites.
Nuclear terrorism: While the means that could produce a global
pandemic are becoming more available, the financial and technological assets needed to produce a nuclear weapon exist in only a very
few states. A nuclear explosion in a major urban area would be a game
changer. There is almost zero probability that a nuclear weapon could
be produced by a non-state entity, although such capacity might reside
in quasi-autonomous sub-state actors in some countries. A transnational terrorist group could procure a nuclear weapon from a country
whose own internal controls were weak (possibly Pakistan), or which
harbored individuals sympathetic to a global jihadi movement (possibly Iran or Pakistan), or whose leaders needed cash (North Korea). Such
a transnational terrorist group might operate within the territory of the
country from which it had obtained such a weapon, although a country
with areas of limited statehood might be even more attractive.
Because nuclear weapons are so hard to obtain, the probability of a
nuclear event, whatever that probability might be, is less than the danger of a biological attack. But there is no analogue in the nuclear arena
to creating a more robust domestic public health infrastructure. The
United States and other countries have already taken some measures
to strengthen their own borders against possible biological or nuclear
attacks. Internationally, the United States should take four actions, as
described below: make limiting nuclear proliferation a major priority;
secure alliance partners who could engage in some burden-sharing
to combat unconventional threats; strengthen the security capacity of
weakly governed states that might harbor transnational terrorist organizations but temper aspirations for fundamental political reform; and
avoid direct intervention.
Make limiting nuclear proliferation a major priority: The NonProliferation Treaty is the most effective instrument available. The
United States should also discourage proliferation in East Asia by reinforcing existing security commitments to Japan and South Korea and
continue working to prevent nuclear proliferation in the Middle East,

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particularly in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the Gulf States. However,
the United States should not provide anything equivalent to NATO
extended nuclear deterrence guarantees to allies in the Middle East
because doing so could incentivize more destabilizing behavior in the
region.
Secure alliance partners who could engage in some burden sharing to combat unconventional threats: The interests of China, Russia,
and the United States are not so different in this arena. The terrorist
dangers arising from weak or failing states do not disproportionately
impact the United States. Instead, all of the challenges presented by
weak and failing states, including transnational terrorism, disease,
criminality, and humanitarian crises, are regional and global. Often the
burden, especially for humanitarian crises and refugees, falls disproportionately on neighboring states. The civil strife in Syria has created
over 1.5 million refugees each in Syria and Jordan, and over 1 million
in Lebanon. The refugee crisis has spilled over into Europe.
Because of 9/11, the United States has taken the lead in combatting
transnational terrorism. Terrorism, however, is a problem that threatens
many of the major countries in the world, including those in Western
Europe and North America, as well as China and Russia. Presidents
Putin and Xi are not allies of the United States by any stretch, but
they both share a strong interest in controlling militant jihadi activities at home and abroad. France, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Britain,
France, and Canada have all suffered attacks by Islamic terrorists. In the
developing world, as well, a significant number of lives have been lost
in many countries, including India, Pakistan, Egypt, Tunisia, Indonesia,
Argentina, Mali, Algeria, and Nigeria.
The United States has not yet framed a strategy for addressing transnational Islamic jihadi terrorism that has secured support from other
countries. The next president should make the development of such a
strategy a priority. Successfully enlisting other states could reduce the
costs for the United States, enhance security, and provide opportunities
for mutual gain even among states, like Russia and China, whose interests often do not align with ours.

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Strengthen the security capacity of weakly governed states that
might harbor transnational terrorist organizations but temper aspirations for fundamental political reform: The very ambitious American
response to 9/11, especially the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and
even the more measured response to a potential humanitarian disaster
in Libya, have not reduced the threats, existential or otherwise, to the
United States. The overthrow of the Saddam and Gadhafi dictatorships
created environments in which conventional state authority has eroded
and in which militant jihadi activities, which have attracted Muslims
from Western democracies, have increased. Conditions are deteriorating in both countries.
Instead of direct interventions, the United States can best improve
the security capacity of weak states by fostering confederal and consociational structures. These strategies require identifying, where possible, local actors who have their own interests in providing security.
Plan Colombia was successful because President Uribe had an interest in cleaning up the police and judiciary. With a better functioning
judicial system it was much easier to support the Colombian army.
With external support, the Colombian army was able to degrade the
FARC. Where ethnic fragmentation has undermined the possibilities
for a legitimate national government, the U.S. should support confederal and consociational political structures rather than single national
unified governments. Confederal institutions are more likely to provide
security in their particular regions than is a central government that is
distrusted by significant parts of the population.
Avoid direct intervention: Even in the case of explicitly transnational jihadi groups, the United States should avoid direct military
intervention, with the possible exception of short-term strikes against
well-defined targets that might be threatening the United States
directly. Military interventions are extremely costly and cannot put
weakly governed and poor states on a path to consolidated democracy. Interventions in the Islamic world, moreover, often create unintended effects—everything from generating greater sympathy for
transnational jihadi movements among citizens in Western countries

Cyber Acts of Mass Disruption
Cyber threats are evolving far more quickly than policy or law, generating possible “black swan” acts of mass disruption emanating primarily from states, notably North Korea, Russia, China, and Iran, but
also non-state actors. The full range of cyber threats is broad, including petty theft, espionage intended to give foreign states or organizations decision advantage, massive theft of intellectual property from
American corporations, disablement of US military systems in times
of conflict, and attacks on critical infrastructure that could paralyze or
fundamentally alter society. The theft of personally identifiable information is a crime, a consumer annoyance, and a significant cost center
for businesses but it is not a national security threat. Large-scale espionage is a national security concern but not a black swan: it is possible to anticipate and defend against espionage by investing in and
demanding better cyber defenses of government networks housing sensitive information and by improving our own intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities to retain the intelligence advantage. Many
rudimentary defensive measures are well-known and have long been
recommended but have not been implemented, including at the Office
of Personnel Management and the Department of Defense. Attacks in
times of conflict intended to disable US military capabilities are important to prevent but they are also not black swans; they are part and parcel of warfare in the twenty-first century. Theft of intellectual property

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to collapsing central authority structures in target states—which can
outweigh the gains of short-term advances. Although the United States
should provide weapons, material resources, logistical support, air support, and perhaps a limited number of advisors to those entities fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, it should not commit to anything
like the kind of full-scale military operation that would be required to
defeat the Islamic State, which may not be possible in any event. The
United States should only intervene directly where there is strong evidence of a transnational terrorist group intent on attacking American
targets.

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is, similarly, a major national security challenge but not a black swan.
The probability distribution of attacks aimed at large-scale intellectual
property theft from American business is known because it is occurring daily. Combatting IP theft requires elevating the issue in bilateral discussions with the worst offenders and making clear that those
found responsible will be punished. This will become increasingly difficult: the more that the United States seeks to deter cyber IP theft by
punishing those responsible, the more incentive there will be for guilty
parties to hide their activities.
Cyber black swans consist of attacks on national critical infrastructure such as financial institutions or power systems that could fundamentally disrupt or alter the way society functions. Because 85 percent
of critical infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector,
protecting the nation from cyber acts of mass disruption is challenging.
The United States must work to develop international norms against
cyber acts of mass disruption. The best place to start is working with
China to develop a formalized arrangement to protect global financial systems, an issue on which China and the U.S. have strong shared
interests.
Such an effort should be part of a comprehensive cyber strategy that
includes deterrence, defense, resilience, capacity-building, and normbuilding to improve America’s cyber posture overall and mitigate the
threat of black swan cyber attacks on critical infrastructure in particular. The United States should develop a deterrence posture that delineates more clearly acts of national significance and how the United
States would respond. The United States must also foster greater investment in and implementation of cyber defensive capabilities to protect vital US military, government, and critical infrastructure systems
from attack, including lowering regulatory and legal hurdles for threat
information-sharing between companies and sectors. The United States
must invest in developing an educated cyber work force so that individuals, companies, organizations, and government agencies can all better protect their information from cyber threats that are evolving daily.
Finally, the next president should work to maintain US leadership in

Russia
Dealing with the Russian Threat
to European Security_The Challenge
President Putin’s decision to annex Crimea and support separatist movements in eastern Ukraine constitutes the greatest threat to European
security since the end of the Cold War. Together with our allies,
American leaders can manage this threat. But doing so will require a
commitment to a long-term strategy of containment, selective engagement of Russian society, more robust support of NATO, and a way to
make American red lines with Russia clear.
For decades, American foreign policymakers became accustomed
to Russian weakness. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia
no longer possessed the military capacity to threaten other European
countries. What military means the Kremlin did have, it used in Chechnya, fighting two wars there in the 1990s. Since then, Russia has been
fighting a low-intensity but ongoing counterterrorist war throughout
the Caucasus. NATO therefore stopped focusing on deterring a military
threat against the West, and instead assumed new missions in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Libya.
In fact, however, Russian military spending has increased dramatically over the last fifteen years, averaging 3.8 percent of GDP over a
steady period of economic growth. Even as economic growth slowed,
first in 2008 and again in 2014, Russian military spending has continued to increase, reaching 4.5 percent in 2014 and nearly double
that percentage for the first half of 2015. Russia today is third only
behind the United States and China in total military spending. Russia
could annihilate the United States in a nuclear war, and continues to
modernize its nuclear forces. In addition, the quality of Russian conventional weapons—including new tanks, new anti-missile systems,

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matters of Internet governance and the US vision of an open and trusted
global Internet.

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and a new a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV)—also has continued to
improve. In terms of total capacity, Russia is not a superpower today
and never will be one again; however, Russia will rank as one of the
top five military powers in the world for decades to come.
For most of the post-Cold War era, Russian intentions regarding
Europe also seemed to become more benign. During the first two
decades after the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russian leaders sought to
adopt democratic and market institutions at home and integrate into
European and international institutions. After becoming president in
2000, Putin gradually changed this course. He weakened democratic
practices, but also implemented radical market reforms. Putin and
Medvedev (Medvedev became president in 2008, and Putin became
prime minister) invaded Georgia in 2008, but also cooperated with
the United States by placing new sanctions against Iran in 2010 and
removing chemical weapons from Syria in 2013. Russia’s invasion of
Georgia in August 2008 should have been a wake-up call about growing Russian intentions and capabilities to project force abroad. But
many at the time saw this conflict as an aberration—a one-off sparked
by specific circumstances—and not a new trend in Russian international behavior.
In 2012, Putin became president again at a time when tens of
thousands of Russians were protesting against falsified elections and
unaccountable government. The last time such large demonstrations
occurred in Russia was 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed.
Rather than seek accommodation with his political opposition, Putin
cracked down, including new restrictions on civil society, attacks on
independent media, and arrests of demonstrators. To justify this crackdown, Putin and his state-controlled media portrayed his critics as traitors and agents of the United States. Similar to the Soviet era, Putin
needed the United States to be held responsible for all of Russia’s economic and social woes. The shrill anti-Americanism uttered by Russian
leaders and echoed on state-controlled television reached a fanatical pitch after Putin’s annexation of Crimea. He has made clear that
he embraces confrontation with the West, no longer feels constrained

The Solution
To respond to this new threat in Europe, the next president of the United
States needs to deter further Russian aggression. The strategy of seeking to change Kremlin behavior through engagement and integration,
practiced by Democratic and Republican leaders alike for most of the
post-Cold War era, cannot be resurrected now. Instead, the new US
president must seek to contain Russian aggression in Europe until the
Kremlin decides to change course. Our current standoff with Russia
could last a long time.
Above all else, the United States needs to continue to strengthen
NATO, making bright the distinction between NATO and non-NATO
members. The single greatest danger in Europe is that Putin might
underestimate NATO’s willingness to respond to a formal or informal
incursion against a NATO member state. For instance, what if Russians
died during a clash between ethnic Russians and ethnic Estonians in
Narva, an Estonian city near the Russian border, and some Russian
“volunteers” decided to cross into Estonia to avenge the deaths of their
brethren? Putin needs to understand clearly what NATO’s response
would be. The United States, together with our NATO allies, must do

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by international laws and norms, and is not afraid to wield Russian
power to revise the international order. Putin has framed the conflict in
Ukraine as one between Russia and the United States, not just one of
interests, but also one of conservative Russian values versus decadent,
liberal, imperial American norms.
To date, this strategy has succeeded, bolstering anti-American sentiments and Putin’s popularity to all-time highs. It is hard, therefore, to
imagine the circumstances under which Putin might pivot back to a
more cooperative strategy toward the United States in the foreseeable
future.
In short, Russia’s military power, combined with Putin’s nationalist anti-Americanism and aspirations to expand Russia’s influence and
control of its historic “near abroad,” means that the United States is
likely to face a rising number of contests for influence in Europe.

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everything to prevent Putin from making miscalculations about our
Article 5 commitments to all NATO members.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, much has been done already to
make this commitment more credible. NATO has doubled the size of
its NATO Response Force. At its core is a new brigade known as the
Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF)—five thousand soldiers
who will be able to deploy within forty-eight hours. For the first time,
NATO also has a rotating force in the alliance countries that border
Russia. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called the Readiness
Action Plan “the biggest reinforcement of our collective defense since
the end of the Cold War” when the program was introduced after the
NATO summit in Wales in September 2014. NATO also is creating six
new command centers in Eastern Europe to better connect local military forces to NATO; and the US Department of Defense is considering prepositioning tanks, fighting vehicles, and other heavy weapons in
Eastern Europe which, if executed, would increase dramatically the
Alliance’s ability to deter Russia.
More, however, can be done. For instance, NATO troops, including American, ought to be stationed in all member states that share
a border with Russia. NATO allies also must work together to deter
Russian efforts to destabilize government authority in front-line states,
especially in areas where a high percentage of Russian speakers live.
Finally, more should be done to compel all member states to spend
the required 2 percent of their GDP on defense and to spend more
productively.
In addition to strengthening NATO, the next president of the United
States must continue to maintain the worldwide effort to punish Russian
officials and their private sector allies for aggression against Ukraine.
Sanctions cannot be lifted against Russian individuals or companies
until the Kremlin discontinues completely its support for separatists in
eastern Ukraine. Sanctions put in place in response to Russian annexation of Crimea cannot be lifted until Russia gives back this territory to
Ukraine or negotiates a resolution with Ukraine, even if these sanctions
must remain in place for decades. Most importantly, the Unites States

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must signal clearly the economic costs of Russian military escalation in
Ukraine. For instance, if Russian forces push deeper into Ukrainian territory, then the United States must lead the world in removing Russian
banks from the SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial
Telecommunication), the organization that facilitates international
financial transactions for more than ten thousand banks around the
world. Conversely, if Russia does leave Ukraine, then sanctions should
be lifted.
Third, Ukraine needs additional Western assistance, especially US
Treasury support, to restructure giant debts accumulated during the
Yanukovich era. If Ukraine executes on a reform agenda, the Ukrainian
government should be rewarded with new money. Ukrainian leaders
also need more help from Western governments, including the United
States, in deepening economic reforms and attracting new investment.
If the Ukrainian economy implodes, Putin wins. Putting Ukraine on a
path that might lead to consolidated democracy would be a tremendous achievement, one that is probably beyond the reach of the United
States, its allies, and international financial institutions. Nevertheless,
Ukraine does abut Western Europe. Its prospects are better than those
of other rent-seeking states.
Providing the Ukrainian military with more sophisticated radar and
drones, as well as sharing intelligence, could help reduce civilian casualties should fighting flare substantially again. The Ukrainian military
must receive the weapons, training, and equipment it needs to deter
future Russian military threats.
The new American president should also convene an international donors’ conference to create a “Donbass Development Fund”
for reconstruction in eastern Ukraine after the war. The mere creation
of such a fund would help change the negative image of the West in
the region, as would new scholarships and internship programs in the
United States and Europe.
Greater engagement in the war of ideas should be a fourth component of a more effective strategy for containing the Russian threat in
Europe. At the end of the Cold War, democrats thought that they had

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won this war of ideas. Liberal democracies, especially those in Europe,
stopped engaging in efforts to advance liberal, democratic agendas.
Budgets for academic exchanges were cut. Media outlets, such as
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the BBC, received far less. With a
few exceptions, most US government and non-governmental organizations engaged in supporting civil society groups in the non-­democratic
parts of Europe also saw their budgets decline significantly in the last
decade. Putin then made it even harder for them to operate inside
Russia, by closing down USAID, banning some other American organizations from operating in Russia, and making criminal the receipt
of foreign money by Russian NGOs. In parallel, the Russian state has
devoted tremendous new resources to its own soft power projects both
within Russia and abroad. Today, the West is not adequately explaining its policies to people in eastern Ukraine, let alone to Russians in
Russia. Even in some allied countries, the US perspective is losing out
to the Russian propaganda machine. We need to reverse these trends.
Fifth, the United States must seek to isolate Russia diplomatically.
Putin’s Russia has no real allies. We must keep it that way. Nurturing
Chinese distance from a revisionist Russia is especially important, as is
fostering the independence of states in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and
even Belarus. Chinese and Russian interests will inevitably come into
conflict in Central Asia. Some of the “stans” are major energy producers and China is the most important future market for these resources,
but Russia, because of existing pipelines, has substantial control over
how these resources are developed and deployed. The United States
should not resist greater Chinese involvement in Central Asia; it cannot
do much about this in any event and such expansion will push Russia
and China apart.
Sixth, the United States should continue to seek ways to engage
directly with the Russian people, including offering student exchanges
and scholarships; encouraging peer-to-peer dialogue with non-­
governmental organizations; and allowing Russian companies not tied
to the state to continue to work with Western partners. In Russia, as
in other closed-access polities around the world, there is not a set of

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policies that can put a country on a secure path toward consolidated
democracy. Support for civil society groups, or even specific bureaus,
can, however, help to create a network of organizations committed to
greater openness that could be (although will not necessarily be) consequential at some point in the future. At the right historical moment
organizations that appeared to be on the margin, such as Helsinki
Watch Groups in Europe, may be critical.
Russia and the United States, even Putin’s Russia, have an important
shared interest in preventing nuclear proliferation. Russia has experienced many more transnational terrorist incidents than the United
States. Muslim populations in Russia are disaffected. Nuclear proliferation, with the possibility of a nuclear weapon or even nuclear material
finding its way to a transnational terrorist organization, is as threatening
for Russia as it is for the United States. Cooperation with Russia on nonproliferation may, however, mean compromising with Russia on other
issues.
This new era of confrontation between Russia and the West will not
end soon. The military stalemate in eastern Ukraine also could endure
a long time. With the right strategy, however, Russia can be contained.

SINCE THE END of the Second World War, there has been no war among
major countries. Life expectancy around the world has increased dramatically, even in the poorest countries. Colonialism has ended. Prosperity is not universal, but it is spreading. The United States is not
solely responsible for these felicitous outcomes, but they would not
have occurred without American leadership.
America’s finest foreign policy moments have involved the triumph of democracy over autocratic, repressive, and sometimes racist
regimes. The defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the Second
World War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, were singular moments in world
history. The present international environment offers no equivalent
opportunities.
The future of democracy, prosperity, and liberty, not just in America
but throughout the world, will depend on how well the United States
manages the threats that could be generated by the rise of China, the
decline of Russia, or unconventional attacks from relatively weak
actors, state or non-state. Russia’s capabilities and intentions, especially
under Putin, are clear. China’s capacity going forward, however, cannot be known with confidence. The ability of weak actors, state or nonstate, to launch mass-casualty or massively disruptive attacks against

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the United States is unknowable. Given the uncertainties associated
with future Chinese capabilities and associated with the intentions and
capabilities of actors with limited overall resources but possible access
to lethal and disruptive technologies, the United States must invest in
its existing assets, both multilateral and unilateral. The present array of
American alliances and international organizations does not perfectly
mirror American interests. These bilateral and multilateral institutions,
however, offer a more efficacious set of policy instruments than the
United States could deploy on its own. At the same time, the United
States must invest wisely to build economic, diplomatic, and military
levers that can be deployed against a wide array of threats. Amid a
world of global uncertainty, pragmatic engagement demands greater
flexibility and innovation in American leadership.

Karl W. Eikenberry is the William J. Perry Fellow in International
Security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
and a distinguished fellow with the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific
Research Center at Stanford University. He served as the US
ambassador to Afghanistan from May 2009 until July 2011 and
had a thirty-five-year career in the US Army, retiring with the
rank of lieutenant general.
James D. Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in
the School of Humanities and Sciences, a professor of political science, and a senior fellow in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, all at Stanford. He is a member of
the National Academy of Sciences (elected 2012), a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 2002), and a
program member of the Institutions, Organizations, and Growth
Group at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the
Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and a resident in FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule
of Law. He is chairman of the editorial board of The American
Interest, a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins SAIS Foreign Policy
Institute, and a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace and the Center for Global Development.

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David M. Kennedy is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History,
Emeritus, at Stanford, where he received the Dean’s Award for
Distinguished Teaching in 1988. He was awarded the Pulitzer
Prize in history in 2000 for Freedom from Fear: The American
People in Depression and War. He received a BA in history from
Stanford University and an MA and PhD from Yale University.
Stephen D. Krasner is the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International
Relations at Stanford University, and senior fellow at the Freeman
Spogli Institute and the Hoover Institution. From 2005 to 2007 he
served under Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice as the director
of policy planning at the State Department where he worked on
foreign assistance reform and other projects. Krasner also spent a
year in Washington at the beginning of the Bush administration,
first on policy planning at the State Department and then with
Rice at the National Security Council.
Abraham D. Sofaer, who served as legal adviser to the US Department of State from 1985 to 1990, was appointed the first George
P. Shultz Distinguished Scholar and Senior Fellow at the Hoover
Institution in 1994. Sofaer’s work focuses on the power over war
within the US government and on issues related to international
law, terrorism, diplomacy, and national security.
Amy Zegart is the Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, professor (by courtesy) at Stanford’s Graduate School of
Business, and co-director of Stanford’s Center for International
Security and Cooperation. She was previously a professor of
public policy at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. She
serves on the FBI Intelligence Analysts Association National
Advisory Board, the Los Angeles Police Department’s Counterterrorism and Community Police Advisory Board, the Secretary
of Energy Advisory Board Task Force on Nuclear Nonproliferation, the Kratos Defense and Security Solutions board, and is a
lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

THE CERTAINTIES OF THE COLD WAR, such as they were, have disappeared. The United States now confronts several historically unique
challenges, including the rise of a potential peer competitor, a rate of
technological change unseen since the 19th century, the proliferation
of nuclear and biological capabilities, and the possible joining of these
capabilities with transnational terrorist movements. There has been no
consensus on a grand strategy or even a set of principles to address specific problems. Reactive and ad hoc measures are not adequate.
The Hoover Institution’s Working Group on Foreign Policy and
Grand Strategy has explored an array of foreign policy topics over the
past two years with a goal of developing orienting principles about
the most important policy challenges to better serve America’s interests.
Members: Peter Berkowitz, Coit D. Blacker, Mariano-Florentino
Cuéllar, Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry, James D. Fearon, Francis
Fukuyama, David M. Kennedy, Stephen D. Krasner (co-chair), Michael
A. McFaul, Admiral Gary Roughead, Abraham D. Sofaer, Amy Zegart
(co-chair)

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About the Hoover Institution’s
Working Group on
Foreign Policy and Grand Strategy

The United States is exceptionally secure. Many Americans, however,
do not feel secure. This anxiety stems from the fact that the United
States faces several long-term threats that may or may not emerge.
America must have a national security strategy that acknowledges
this uncertainty and hedges as well as engages, acknowledging that
resources are not limitless.

Three orienting principles should guide the national security strategy of
the next president. First, we should be unapologetic about the pursuit
of American economic and security interests and more tempered in the
pursuit of ideals. Second, the United States should focus on nurturing
and utilizing existing strengths. Third, the next president must focus on
developing national capabilities (diplomatic, economic, political, military)
that can be deployed against a number of different potential threats
rather than being dedicated to any one possible kind of threat that might
never manifest itself.

www.hooverpress.org

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